The present invention relates to the field of wireless communications and, more particularly, to providing dynamically-translated public address system announcements to mobile devices.
Conventional public address systems generally assume that the people hearing or reading the announcement understand the language in which it is spoken/written. In today's globally-diverse environment, this is often not the case. A simple approach for combating this problem has been to make the announcements in multiple languages. However, these languages are usually limited to those languages of the more prominent groups of visitors, leaving those from more minor language groups still at a disadvantage.
Translation software applications exist for mobile devices that will translate audio and/or text between languages. However, locations using public address systems are often quite noisy. This makes it difficult for a user to clearly capture the audio of the announcement being broadcast by the public address system, and, subsequently, the quality of the translation would most likely be poor.